Use Your Juice

In 1993 I was a naive screenwriter. I had written a script thatI felt was worthy to be made in to a major motion picture. I was not so delusional that I thought I could win an Oscar, but I did think it was quite a good piece of work. I knew a producer and asked him to read it. Before he even looked at the title he looked at me and said "Who do you know?" It was clear that I did not understand as he then stated, "I don't care what this story is about, let alone if it is any good. What I need to know is, who do you know?" Again,  I was speechless. The man then stated "You need to understand that your main goal should be to get the script sold, not made, and that it has nothing to do with talent. It's all about who you know - you gotta use your juice kid."

Those five words have rung in my head for the past 17 years. It's all about your rolodex; your network. 13 years ago no one knew who Imagistic was; to be honest i could barely remember it and called us imagetic for the first 3 months. I knew that what we needed to do was to  get our name associated with as many big brands as possible; so I closed Disney as our very first client. Having that logo on our website would help; and it did (until Disney sent us a letter telling us to take it down). We started to close more and more deals with big name clients: CPK, Network Associates, Paramount, Estee Lauder, GE and many more. I knew that by building our portfolio with brand names we would be successful.

Now, the reason for this was not to boost my ego - it was to instill confidence with new and future clients. By aligning Imagistic with well known brands, prospective clients would have greater trust and a willingness to work with us - "if they worked with GE then they could definitley help us".